Avoiding Pride in the Pastoral Life
By nature, pastoral life is one that tempts us toward a prideful life.
You would think it was the opposite, huh? For the most part, when people envision a pastor, they think of someone who makes it their “ambition to lead a quiet life” (1 Thes. 4:11 NIV), eagerly shepherds the flock of God (1 Pet. 5:2), and preaches the word with complete patience and teaching (2 Tim. 4:2). This is how we traditionally imagine the spirit of a pastor—not because we have created some unrealistic vision of ministry, but because Scripture has laid it out for us like that. People can (and should) think of pastors as those who speak gently, carry a well-read Bible, provide nuggets of wisdom, and always have a listening ear available for anyone willing to share their sorrows. For their part, many pastors do their best to uphold this public image to parishioners.
But I wonder if a different kind of pastoral life is being offered to pastors like us today? One that has been hijacked by success-driven strategists, edgy entrepreneurs, and leadership seminar gurus who tempt pastors to reinvent the pastoral life into something that can be measured on an Excel spreadsheet.
Two Paths to Pride
Ironically, pastors don’t even need this kind of “help” for their life to become more prideful than pastoral. There’s a constant temptation to try to be in control, like God—a temptation which transcends time and culture. Yet this additional, 21st-century temptation for pastoral ministry to morph into something it was never intended to be is everywhere, and in its wake are frustrated, disillusioned, worn-out pastors who attempt to measure their effectiveness with metrics that only work in places where the care of souls is not necessary.
This pride can flesh itself out in two specific ways (among others). Depending on the person and their life experiences, pride can have a pastor believing that everything they touch turns to gold because they have bought into the mindset that they are the ones with the power and charisma to control the destiny of their churches and ministries. What makes this even more troubling is that this kind of leader is usually applauded and affirmed for exhibiting this style of leadership behavior.
The flipside to this is the pastor with an inverted sense of pride. They compare themselves with the successful and (over)confident pastors of the world, and only measure their effectiveness by the accomplishments that everybody can see. Such pastors may appear more humble on the outside but are likely just as self-focused as the more overtly prideful pastors.
Both have put themselves in the center of a calling that is inherently not about them and have adopted a heart posture that keeps their eyes firmly stuck on “me.” These are broken metrics. And here’s a thought—do pastors need “metrics?”
The Unseen Work of a Pastor
If you’re reading this as someone who’s been a pastor for a while, you may have some on-the-job experience of all the ways in which a pastor is tempted to do almost anything but, well, pastor: that is, pursuing personal holiness, cultivating a devoted prayer life, caring for your people, and preaching the Word. The problem is that I’m not ok with just doing those things because I fear that my people are not ok with me just doing those things.
Eugene Peterson wasn’t wrong when he said that nobody knows what a pastor does on the other six days of the week. So what ends up happening is that I invest my time in opportunities that increase my visibility. I move beyond my calling in order to position myself as a relentless doer rather than a receiver. Instead of pursuing the (largely unseen) practices of communion with Jesus, formation in his word, and relational cultivation with his people, I treat my role as more like that of a general contractor—making sure everyone can see what I’m building and affirm my progress—without giving the slightest attention to the state of my soul or the well-being of my body.
But this is all kinds of folly. As with a gardener that greets their plants and flowers with a water pail on a warm summer morning, your care for your body and soul helps you become the person you’re called to be, before you spend even an hour doing the work of the pastor that people expect you to be. I kind of think you should read that last sentence more than once, if you wouldn’t mind.
A Hearer and a Doer
When a pastor considers humility to be one of their life pursuits, there will be an emphasis on the word be over the word do. Make no mistake, doing is essential, but doing in the absence of becoming is how I become undone as a pastor. This presents us with a tension though. I remember trying to flesh this out to a group of men at a gathering for church planters, after which one came up to me and said something along the lines of “I hear what you’re saying, but all of this talk of being over doing is frustrating to me. What am I supposed to do? Just sit around and do nothing so that I can be something?”
Well, not exactly. James makes it clear that we are to be doers of the Word so that we don’t deceive ourselves into thinking we are something that we are not:
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. (James 1:22–25)
Yet I think it’s fairly significant that James mentions looking into the perfect law of liberty—embodied in the person of Jesus—so that we can be a “doer who acts.” This clues us in that James was not simply talking about the work of our hands but the work of our heart. We have to “hear” before we can “do” and “look” before we can “act.”
This article is adapted from The Unhurried Pastor by Ronnie Martin and Brian Croft (The Good Book Company, 2024). In the book, they encourage fellow shepherds to embrace a more present-focused, unhurried approach to ministry. Ronnie and Brian have decades of experience pastoring churches and supporting ministry leaders.